


Brief Conversations with the Woman

by May_Shepard



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angry John, Canon Compliant, Clueless Sherlock, Drug Use, F/F, Gap Filler, I might have lied about it getting better, I'm Sorry, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Irene as Advice Fairy, M/M, Not Adlock, Pain, Physically Painful Sexual Situation, Pining, Post-Reichenbach, Relationship Advice, Requited Love, Resolved Sexual Tension, Series 3 Gap Filler, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension, What Happened After Karachi, at least John and Sherlock are danger sluts, basically it's 95 percent bootheel to your face, once this plane clears the tarmac it will get better, somebody's gotta die, the first 14 chapters are rather dismal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-24
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-03-19 11:32:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 21,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3608520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May_Shepard/pseuds/May_Shepard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Want to solve a puzzle? Keep the best puzzle solver you know alive. </p>
<p>Sherlock has a puzzle to solve, and his name is John Watson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For my Hellions.
> 
> I crave your comments, messages, and attentions like air. Please leave a comment or get in touch!
> 
> [Come say hello on Tumblr!](http://may-shepard.tumblr.com/)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Karachi.

On horseback through Mahal Kohistan Wildlife Sanctuary outside Karachi. To their right, the sky is growing pale. It will be dawn in less than two hours.

The Woman rides a chestnut mare with short, turned-in ears: part Baluchi, then. Sherlock has taken the black Egyptian Arabian stallion with the huge, intelligent eyes from the encampment. No one was left to claim him by the time the fight was over.

They haven't spoken since the dispute they had about who should ride the Arabian. The terrain rises toward a ridge in the distance. No one is following.

The Woman is watching him, her eyes sharp. Her body language suggests mild alarm. She must know she's safe for now, so something else is bothering her.

"Why did you rescue me?" she asks.

He smiles. She moves straight to the point. That's good. He wonders if she can deduce it for herself. "Moriarty was going to kill us. To kill me and John Watson."

She turns away, gazes at the scrub to the side of the road where two buff-coloured jackals move with easy grace, unconcerned by their presence. "That's true."

"For a time I thought you were the one who stopped him."

She smiles. "If I did stop him, it was a happy accident."

"Yes. Or unhappy, if you were to ask my brother. More to the point, there was a reason why he didn't kill us."

"He needed you," she says.

"To crack the code. Want to solve a puzzle? Keep the best puzzle solver you know alive."

She's too clever to ask the obvious questions aloud. Instead she falls silent, eyes fixed on the far horizon. Once they're on the other side of the sanctuary, it will be a short ride to the airfield. He can spare a few days before John suspects he's not undercover on that case in Brussels. He only hopes it will be enough time.

She laughs softly. "To solve a puzzle, you'll need your best puzzle solver. There's only one sort of puzzle you can't solve, Mr. Holmes."

To his relief her tone isn't mocking, but soft and gentle. They've moved past a certain level of facade. He's counting on it. If she's going to help him, he needs to be able to speak with her about certain things. He needs her to see him. He closes his eyes against the cold wind that moves over his face. She already sees him. She saw him before he saw himself.

"He's a very lucky boy," she says. "He might not know it, but he is."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Karachi.

Lisbon, a tiny alley off a side street that opens onto a terraced yard where they have taken a room each. The Woman sits at the desk in her room, brushes her damp hair, which she has bleached and coloured auburn. She's coloured her eyebrows too, a deep shade of red. Sherlock leans in the doorway and watches her.

"Kate would be appalled," she says. "It's her colour."

He shifts. She's spoken about Kate more frequently than anyone else. The way Kate brings her tea in bed each morning and sits with her while they go over her appointment schedule. The way Kate never uses the word "darling" casually or with anyone else. Kate's legs in silk stockings.

"You used her colour because you miss her."

The Woman frowns. "Yes."

"Do you really think she would mind, given the circumstances?"

The Woman smiles. She's watching him in the mirror. "She prefers me dark. Isn't that how he likes you?"


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Karachi.

In the street, after nightfall, seeking out a place to eat. Sherlock finds that for once, he's enjoying not being on a case. He's the client, here, after all. She has refrained from remarking on the fact that they are finally about to have dinner together. The terms have shifted.

They pass a small group, two women and a man in their late twenties, American tourists by the look of them. The man stares at the Woman, drops his eyes when he sees Sherlock.

One of the women, clearly inebriated, probably jealous, shouts, "You're beautiful together!"

"He's my brother!" the Woman shouts back. She grins at them as the man looks up, his eyes full of hope.

Sherlock watches her, watches him. As they're about to turn the corner, she slides her hand across his arse, squeezes. He jumps. The American man has stopped dead in his tracks, mouth open.

Once they're out of sight she opens the gap between them once more and laughs wickedly. "He'll remember that for the rest of his life," she says. "He'll probably think about it later tonight."

He frowns, eyebrows knitting together. What is the lesson?

As if reading his mind: "Sometimes you must make your impression however you are able, regardless of the cost. In exposing yourself, you expose everyone else."

He resists making the obvious joke about her penchant for self-exposure. He files her words for later.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Karachi.

The next night they find a place where there's music, couples dancing. She doesn't wait for him to ask, just takes his hand, leads him out onto the floor.

For a few moments he lets the music work on him. It's a tango. She knows enough to hold her arms in a frame, let him move her. He steps forward; she steps back. After a few repetitions, he turns, taking her with him, steps long. He spins her away, pulls her back in. She throws her head back and laughs. He can't help but smile. It's been too long.

She mirrors him so well. They are each other, he thinks; she's him from another dimension. He's the head; she's the groin, or possibly the heart. The heart, he hopes. Then again, both would be helpful if she's going to help him solve the puzzle of John.

They're breathless, drinking wine on the patio outside now. Other couples smile at them as they pass on the street.

"Where did you learn to do that?" she asks.

"Amelia Varela," he says.

She raises her glass. "Cheers to Amelia Varela. Was she a client?"

"Argentinian with a habit of writing long letters by hand. She moved to London to be with her now deceased husband but the callus on the middle finger of her dominant hand and the occasional violet ink stain on her index finger suggest she had a lover back home whom she misses and to whom she writes often. That she thinks of him or her frequently is also suggested by her chronic insomnia. Amelia Varela is probably a romantic but useful to me for her stamina and willingness to offer private tutelage at all hours."

The Woman smiles. "She taught you to dance. Is that all?"

He presses his lips together, cocks an eyebrow. "Amelia Varela is seventy-three years old and brooks no nonsense from her students. Nonetheless she would say that despite her best efforts she failed to teach me the passion behind the dance. I'm beginning to think she might have been wrong."

The Woman shakes her head. "If you ever get the chance to dance with him, take it."

Sherlock sighs, looks down the cobbled street. It all fades into darkness beyond the warm yellow light cast through the open windows of the tiny club.

"All I've ever done is dance with him."


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Karachi.

Dawn in the small garden. Later today the Woman will leave Lisbon for South America. He's arranged two new identities, a Canadian passport, a Swiss bank account that Kate has already filled for her. If she makes it through security, she'll be fine, and free in the world.

He wishes he could say the same for himself.

In the corner of the garden, water fills a large decorative vase. Its surface is covered in fine green duckweed. From time to time an orange or white shape breaks through: koi.

If she has any further wisdom to impart, he needs to hear it. Going back home now, he knows he'll only feel disarmed. He feels like his skin is going to pop open, leaving everything that's on the inside to slide wetly to the ground. He's all vulnerability, no skill. Not in this area.

He's not sorry he saved her: after all, she is him, through the looking glass. She hasn't taught him anything of value, though. Nothing he can use.

"It's not that bad," she says from her darkened doorway. She's been standing there watching him for two and a half minutes, based on her posture. He doesn't care.

She sits beside him at the small wrought iron table.

"Last year I had a client, an executive at a marketing firm. A ludicrous man, self-important. Liked to be blindfolded."

He keeps his eyes on the water, waiting for something to crest the surface. Even if he interrupted her she would probably keep going.

"The thing was, he didn't want me to speak while I was beating him. I could threaten him all I wanted while I was tying him up, but once his eyes were covered, he didn't like to hear me. Well, not words, anyway. I could vocalize, but every time I spoke he frowned. Some people just can't stop being bossy, even when they're clearly at a disadvantage."

He looks down at her bare feet where they rest on the base of the table. It's painted white. In contrast her feet are quite pink, toenails aquamarine.

"After a while I got tired of seeing him, so I increased my fees. That did nothing to deter him. That happens sometimes, especially when they can no longer afford me. They find a way. Kate came up with the solution. I bound him and threatened him and blindfolded him, but Kate was the one who beat him. She's not really the beating kind, but she came through for me. Above and beyond, actually. She bruised him harder than I would have."

In the silence that follows, a bird's shrill, loud song sounds into the warm dawn air. Cetti's warbler. He wouldn't have expected to hear one in the heart of the city, but the world is full of surprises.

"You don't know what people are capable of," she says. "Even I don't. I do know that he loves you. That much is obvious."

Just like that, his chest clenches, and unwelcome emotion rises in his throat. The bird sings again. It might be close by, in the next courtyard beyond theirs. He would like to see it. He wants to respond to the Woman, to ask her if she knows why. Why should it be that John Watson feels anything for him at all. Regardless of what she says, he can't believe it's love.

Instead, he asks a different question altogether. "Kate doesn't mind?"

He feels her smile. It runs through her whole body, emanates in soft waves through the air between them. "Kate doesn't mind much. What were you asking about?"

"Your work. Kate doesn't mind what you do. It doesn't interfere with--what you have together."

"It's what drew her to me. There aren't many women who could be in Kate's place and avoid succumbing to jealousy. Fortunately I only need the one."

He knows why John is valuable to him. There is no question of that. He has supported the work from the moment they met. Supported Sherlock, even, despite his byzantine needs and demands. Yet one day, he's certain John will leave to go find everything Sherlock can't give him. Sherlock wants to give him everything, and would, if only John would let him.

He goes down with his thoughts, deep into a coil like the interior of a snail shell. It's a cold, small place, and hard.

She puts her hand over his, where it squeezes the arm of the wrought iron chair. She leans into him, looking into his face earnestly. "You already have him, but he doesn't know it," she says. "What stands between him and knowing it is a sheet of rice paper. Almost nothing at all."

"He's not--you heard him. He doesn't--"

She raises her eyebrows. "You and I both know that isn't exactly true."

He's still in the cold place, one level down from where he was before, the worst place. "I can't. It's not enough for him. I've resolved this before. I'll take what he'll give me willingly, but no more."

Her palm still presses the back of his hand. "You haven't plumbed those depths yet."

The only question left is the one he least wants to ask, the one he needs to ask the most. "How? How do I do it?"

"Patience. Reveal yourself little by little, and wait. Let him see you. Let him consider you from all angles. Not just you, but the space around you. The emptiness when you leave. The joy when you return. When the time comes, he'll tear the veil down himself."

His phone pings: a text alert. He fishes it from the pocket of his dressing gown, shows her the screen. She smiles.

"I suppose he can't sleep either," she says, grinning now. "See? Almost there."


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the fall.

June in Odessa, on a gravel path through Park Tarasa Shevchenka. She sits on a bench, holding a small paper bag full of breadcrumbs. She scatters them to the pigeons, watches them with a look of bemusement, much the same as the one she's given him a thousand times. He's quite certain it isn't safe for her here, but she insisted on coming.

He sits beside her. She touches his hair. It's long now, pale waves held back by a black ribbon, his one affectation. "You look well for a corpse," she says. "A little dandy."

"Always." He smiles.

Hers is cut in a short bob. It's dark again. It is after all her natural colour.

He removes a small brown paper bag from his coat pocket, offers it in exchange for hers. She trades, and he scatters breadcrumbs to the pigeons while her smile softens and her eyebrow loses its quirk.

"It's been stripped," he says. "Still I thought you should have it back."

"Thank you."

He's not sure how to read the look on her face. Nostalgia, maybe. He's feeling it too, albeit his is for the last time they met, when all the possibilities were still there, and he knew he would return to John soon.

"So," she says, tucking the bag away in her pocket. "How are things?"

"Changed."

"And John?"

"He doesn't know I'm alive."

She squints. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder?"

"It's a little extreme, I admit, but necessary." He sits firmly on the park bench but he feels himself falling inside, always falling. It's not the leap from the roof; it's the peculiar sensation that comes with thinking about John, John's hands, John's eyes.

"It's cruel," she says. "Have you considered that?"

He has. Of course he has. It's cruel for him as well, sitting with fingers poised, typing out texts that he will never send. Once he wrote a cryptic note on a postcard from the Vatican.  He burned it rather than take the risk.

"I can't tell him. He would be in danger and I could never do that to him."

She sits in silence beside him. One by one the pigeons decide there's nothing more for them here. They wander away, take flight. It's late afternoon, but the sun still rides high in the sky. Everything crumbles around him. It all crumbles into bitter dust.

"What I need." He clears his throat. "What I want is not what he wants, and that's okay."

"So you threw yourself from a roof and faked your own death to...give him space?"

His laughter barks out of him, surprising. "Well, if you put it that way." Just as quickly, it fades. "No. I had to leave. For so many reasons. For myself." He has said too much. It's all true. He couldn't stay, not in that awkward place between flying and falling.

"One grand gesture and leave him to remember you well."

He shakes his head. "I'm going back. As soon as I'm done, I'll go back. Isn't that what you said to do? 'The emptiness when I leave, the joy when I return?'"

She inhales sharply. Perhaps he's taken things too far. He often does that.

"What do you think will happen when you go back?"

He doesn't answer aloud. There are too many possibilities.

Maybe they'll make a new start, with new adventures. It will be John's choice. Always John's choice. In one possible iteration, John will be so grateful that he will take Sherlock's face in his hands and kiss him on the lips. Happily ever after. Case closed. In another, he will return to find that John Watson has shot himself in the head. If there is a note, Sherlock will not read it.

Whatever the truth, he needs to go back in order to face it.

Across the park, an old woman with a shawl wrapped over her head moves among rose bushes. She is hunched over her cane, head down, fingers pressing the petals of a white bloom. She turns toward them, straightening momentarily. A shock of alarm runs up Sherlock's spine. The woman's movement is too steady, too sure. It's a disguise.

Irene shifts beside him. "I've got to go," she says. She stands over him, smiling. "Thank you for returning what was mine. You could just as easily have kept it."

He shakes his head. "No, I couldn't."

She calls back over her shoulder as she walks toward the old woman. "Give him a chance. Give yourself a chance. Necrophilia is very in this year."

He watches as she joins the old woman, takes her by the arm. The old woman straightens, tosses aside her cane, unwraps her shawl, revealing red curls. They walk away together.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the return.

She texts him, a single word: "Well?"

He sits with the phone in his hand for long minutes, watching the dust motes play in the beam of afternoon light shining in through the windows of 221B. Home. What used to be home, and is now...something else. An uncomfortable shell. Too small and too quiet. It's a number he doesn't recognize, a burner phone, probably. Still, he knows it's her. No one else has her presumption, her way with instant intimacy.

He isn't sure how to reply. It isn't good. It isn't easy.

When the phone rings, he hits "Answer," but says nothing, just holds it to his ear.

"Oh dear," she finally says.

He breaks. It comes on as panic, the sensation that the chair is falling backward, a tightness in his chest. He has to fight something, but there's nothing he can fight. There are tears. He manages to control his breathing at first, but then everything starts hitching and he has to put the phone aside. He can't stand the thought that she is listening to him.

When he begins to settle again, he's bathed in sadness. She is still there. Five minutes have passed. He puts the phone to his ear.

"Hello," she says.

He isn't sure he can speak. "He's moved on."

"I doubt that." Her voice is sure, an anchor. It hurts but he clings to it. Better than the alternative, which is no anchor at all.

"He doesn't live here any more."

"That can change."

"He's getting married. She's--" He doesn't know how to describe Mary. She's...nice? Apparently supportive? Possibly a better strategist than he is, at least when it comes to John.

He hears her sharp intake of breath. "So. It's a longer road than you thought."

"It's over. I told you, I'm not what he wants. He's not speaking to me."

"So you were dead and he found someone else. No matter what she is, who she is, she isn't you."

"He's so angry."

She laughs softly. "What did he do? When he saw you?"

He closes his eyes. God, the floor of the restaurant, John's body laid out on top of his, John's hands, not throttling him so much as caressing his throat. John's face, inches from his. "He...made a display of himself. Publically. Several times. Yelled. Hit me. Split my lip. Gave me a nose bleed."

"Oh," she says. "That's good. That's passion. "

"It's nothing. He hates me."

"You told me he's marrying someone whom he only met because he thought you were dead. Let him go down that road all he wants. He'll find it will only lead back to you."

He doesn't know what to say. He wants to ask her for a prognosis. _How long_? She's no doctor. He's lost his doctor.

Her breathing changes: she takes a deep breath, as if to speak clearly and certainly, but then lets it out again. He sits up. This, now _this_ is interesting. She's calculating? Working herself into a lie? Deciding to tell a half truth? He waits.

"Don't worry," she says.

"Don't worry? I've lost him."

Another long pause. There's something here. An added dimension he hadn't anticipated. What has he missed?

"Marriage never stopped me from having fun," she says. "Married people are just...people. Full of desires, half imagined scenarios."

It's a sidestep. The words catch, and too much breath comes out at the end of the sentence. She's holding something back.

"I won't interfere," he says. "If I ruin this for John, he really will never forgive me." The edge in her conversation has him twitching in his seat. He wants to flush her out. "If you have something more to say, say it."

"Play the dutiful friend then," she says. "You won't have to wait long."

 She hangs up before he can respond.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before the wedding.

He's lying on the sofa in his dressing gown when someone knocks on the door. He isn't taking clients right now. Mrs. Hudson should know better than to let anyone up who isn't John or Mary.

"Yes?" he calls out, lifting his head enough to watch the door.

He sits up as she bustles in, carrying a briefcase and two cloth bags stuffed full of things he can't imagine. Swatches of pink and lilac fabric peek from the top of one; the other appears to be filled with art supplies. "Hello," she says.

"Kate." He tries to modulate his voice but he can't quite keep the surprise out of it.

Kate drops her bundles on the floor in front of the coffee table and closes the door behind her.

Her smile is warm, eyebrows lifted. "She isn't in town, in case you were wondering. Still, she thought you could use reinforcements."

"Because I'm...going into battle?"

She laughs. "Aren't you?"

He watches as she pushes aside a pile of books and three plastic bags filled with lawn trimmings in various states of decay so she can open the briefcase. Inside are file folders and a small box wrapped in black paper. She hands him the box and waits in silence for him to open it.

"I don't need a tie pin," he says, a smile fluttering at his lips. They both know it's not a tie pin.

Her mouth breaks open into a grin and she nods at the box. "Go on."

Inside is a small white card trimmed in gold. The Woman has written him a note, all the communication he can expect from her at this point, he supposes, although he hopes that Kate is more than just a bringer of stuff that will mess up the flat.

 _Write your own ending_ , the card says in her studied cursive. She's signed it _~W_.

The gift is a small gold stylus on a chain. Edwardian. He lifts it in his fingers, twists it. By some clever internal device, the stylus turns and a pencil nib emerges. It's beautiful. He'll wear it on the day. Maybe having it will help him. It will be an anchor.

Kate is useful. So the Woman tells him. He spreads his hands. Today he'll take instruction. "What's all this?"

She hands him one of the file folders from the briefcase, pulls out a roll of sticky tape. Inside are papers: blank sheets with lines to fill in, with spaces for details on the venue, the rehearsal date, the planning. Samples of invitations. He doesn't know why he's surprised to see pictures of John and Mary, the Vicar they'll probably use (a distant relative of John's), the church, a reception hall.

"I'm the best man," he says. "A symbolic role. What do I need all this for?"

Kate takes the folder from his hands, kicks off her shoes, and stands beside him on the sofa. He sifts through another folder: lists of caterers, restaurants they could use for the rehearsal dinner, lists of questions for John and Mary both.

"The main thing is to have as much control as possible over the outcome," Kate says, taping a sheet of paper to the wall. "That way, you won't have to worry about variables. You can just focus on yourself."

He stands, watches her, mouth open. She continues taping.

"That's my crime wall," he says.

She looks at it, head tilted. "Isn't it though."

An hour later they sit together on the floor. Between them are two piles of linen napkins. She folds the corner of hers. "Like this," she says.

He shakes his head. "Just do the whole thing, start to finish. I'll get it."

"Okay," she says. Her hands move quickly, efficiently. He watches them because she came here as a favour and he should learn this, but also because it's easier than looking her in the eye.

"She says she'll be back sooner than you think," Kate tells him, crimping the fabric into a series of folds like waves.

"Oh?" He presses his palms together.

"She's been hard at work, rebuilding her insurance policy." She takes a small metal napkin ring from the table, pushes the centre of the folded napkin into it.

"I see." It would be good, having her back in London. He would like the opportunity to talk with her about things, now that it's over. He blinks to dispel the word: not over. Now that it's different. Now that he knows that he and John are just friends.

Kate pulls the napkin apart, stands it on the ring, shapes it into something like a bird. "Peacock," she says.

"If you say so."

She laughs. "Got it?"

"Mmm." He starts working on his. Like any good teacher, she'll want him to prove that he's learned well.

Over the next thirty minutes they fold lotus blossoms, swans, fleurs-de-lis, roses. As they work, they talk. At first it's just plans for the wedding. Then it's John. He tells her about the day they met, about their first stakeout at Angelo's. John's limp, which seems to have returned a little. John's hand, which acts up sometimes now.

She finishes teaching him how to make the Sydney Opera House. "Well, that's all I've got," she says, reaching behind her for her purse. "My complete napkin index."

"I hope they'll be able to find something they like," he says.

She shrugs, fiddles with her phone. "Doesn't matter what they like, so long as you keep your hand in. When it all goes to hell, you won't have lost any ground."

Another battle metaphor. He's beginning to like Kate.

"I'm not sure I have any ground to lose. I'm his best friend, so he says. Shouldn't that be enough?"

She hands him her phone. "Enough for you, maybe. Have you considered him?"

He stares at it for a few long moments before he understands what he's looking at.

The photo is beautifully composed, like a Renaissance painting of two grown men in some cosy parody of the Pietà. John sits on a divan, face turned down at the man lying in his lap. The other is stretched across him, shoulders over his lap, head tilted to gaze up at him, mouth open in speech or something else.

He doesn't recognize himself at first because of the position of the hands, both of their hands. John's left hand is pressed against his chest, resting there. His right is tangled in Sherlock's hair. He can't quite make out the expression on John's face because the photo is small on Kate's phone but he would say it is gentle, soft. There's a hint of a smile there. Sherlock's right hand clutches John's where it rests on his chest. His left reaches out, fingers caressing John's jaw.

"I don't understand," he says, and it's true.

"It happened while you were waiting for the police, at our house. She left after she drugged you but I was there. I came to before the police arrived. Had a hell of a headache. He insisted on getting you onto the divan, and wouldn't leave you. He sat with you, just like that, for a quarter of an hour, talking to you. He asked if I was okay, but after that it was like I wasn't there. He didn't see that I took that."

Sherlock studies the picture. It's a blank space in his memory. John was so petulant later, after he woke up. He's beginning to understand why. Perhaps.

"What did...we say?"

"Oh, he murmured nonsense, the same stuff over and over. Mostly he told you that it was okay, that you were going to be okay, that he would take care of you, that he had you. You were--"

She watches him carefully.

"I was?"

She inhales sharply. "Verbose. Most of it didn't make sense. A lot of stuff about ash?"

She looks down at her hands. He watches her rub her fingers together: she doesn't know if she should tell him the next part.

"Kate please," he says. "Please if there's something important."

She smiles at him. Her cheekbones are exquisite. She's delicate, he realizes, not just in her features but in her manner. She's being delicate with him. Her eyes flick up at him, return to her lap, and back to his face. She holds his gaze.

"I told Irene I loved her the first night we met. I wasn't being facetious or hyperbolic. I fell for her the instant I saw her, and I told her so. It was a problem for me. She hears it all the time. People line up to worship her and here I was, this little stupid girl in a cotton dress at a dumb party where I thought I might meet some interesting people. She was this titan, this goddess who had gone into the loo to get away from everyone who wanted to talk to her. She didn't like her lipstick, wiped it off with the back of her hand and swore and I was just standing there at the mirror, staring. I'd just refreshed mine and she walked over to me, took my hand, and kissed me on the lips. She looked at herself in the mirror and nodded and thanked me. I just watched her and then I said, 'I could love you.' Stupid, isn't it? I could love you. I just offered myself to her."

Sherlock can't take his eyes off her face.

All this time he's been thinking of Kate as some kind of John analogy, this woman who's decided for whatever reasons of her own to attach herself to the big personality that is the Woman. He should have been paying more attention. Kate is him. He's Kate. He has offered himself to John Watson so many times, in so many ways.

"What happened?" he says.

"The next day a letter came to my flat with an offer of employment. I took the job and we took things from there."

He blinks, rapidly, filing it all away, trying to make it fit in the context of him and John.

The photo is a view into another world, an impossible place where he and John are happy together. He wishes he could remember the sensation of John's legs pressing into his back, John's hand in his hair. "I talked about ash?"

"Mostly."

"The whole time?"

She shakes her head. "You came in and out of focus."

"Kate, what did I say?"

She blushes, but holds his gaze. "You said, 'You're the best man I've ever met, John Watson. It's possible that we should fall in love. Kiss me.'"

His whole world stutters. He can't stop himself now. "What did he say?"

Her smile is mild, but it lights her eyes on fire and that gives him hope. "He said, 'All right.'"

"All right?"

"I don't think he meant just to calm you down. He said, 'All right.'" She takes a deep breath. "He kissed your hand. He kissed your fingers, and told you to rest. He said, 'We can talk about it later.'"

All across the floor of the sitting room, linen peacocks and swans and flowers and opera houses sit, their clean white lines in happy contrast to the faded red of the rug.

"There was never a later," he tells them, and Kate.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the wedding.

The boy with the patchy beard and filthy Christmas jumper shakes him awake. It's dawn. No one else is stirring.

He sits up on the mattress. The movement stirs the cloud of stench that's built up around him while he slept. Some of it is from the mattress; some of it is his.

"Shezza. There's a lady here to see you."

He squints at the boy. The boy is okay. Everything's okay and the light slanting in through the empty window pane, hitting the edge of the broken glass, is beautiful. He's still high.

"What did you say?"

"A lady. For you. She's in the next room."

 _A lady._ Strange choice of words. Who would come here that the boy doesn't already know?

The light on the broken window rises, shimmering, into the air, floats across the room like a piece of gauze caught in the wind, and lands on his toes, blessing him.

The boy shakes him. He nodded, but he's back now.

He finds his feet, rubs his eyes, perfectly relaxed, perfectly content, a little cold as he moves into the next room, more of a balcony really because a big piece of the exterior wall is missing.

The Woman is standing with her back to him, smoking a cigarette. No: not smoking it; there's no lipstick trace on it. She's holding a lit cigarette. She hands it to him, arm's length. Her eyes narrow as he approaches, but to her credit she doesn't cover her mouth and nose. She probably wants to. It's fine. He understands.

"There's a woman sleeping in your bedroom," she says.

"I know." He inhales deeply. The smoke drags through his lungs. Delicious.

"She's very beautiful. I was tempted to stay a while."

"What were you doing at my flat?"

She presses her lips together. "Looking for you. I've only just returned. I thought you might need some support?"

"I'm fine," he says. It's true. Everything is good, and will be for the next hour and ten minutes, at least.

"John?"

He takes a drag off the cigarette, looks out through the hole in the wall. The sun is rising. It illuminates the weedy carpark, the haphazard clump of shrubs and trees that have grown up around this abandoned place. Life will insist on itself, he muses. Even when it's not really worth it.

"I haven't spoken to him in a month. Not since the wedding, not really."

She paces. "Nothing?"

A sensation that has nothing to do with the drug in his system skirls down his spinal column, blossoms through his chest. He remembers her on the phone, the hitch in her voice, the changes in her breathing pattern. His body doesn't summon the adrenaline that normally comes with a deduction; instead he feels a new understanding move over his skin, soak into his bones. She cares about the fact that he and John haven't spoken, but there's an edge to her concern, a nervousness. This isn't just sympathy.

His eyelids are heavy. His limbs are heavy. He could sink through the floor and into the ground and disappear with the knowledge that there is something she isn't telling him, and that would be fine, that would be okay.

She shakes him awake. Somehow he's still on his feet. Her phone (not _the_ phone, that's long gone or squirreled away somewhere) is in her hand.

"He's coming," she says.

"What?"

"He's coming here."

He looks through the hole and down into the carpark. "Impossible."

No one knows where he is. Tomorrow the boy in the filthy Christmas jumper will leak a photo to a carefully selected reporter who will not use it for a story, but will instead take it to his editor who will know exactly what to do with it. The news of Sherlock's habit will travel within the company that owns the paper, right up to the top. That hasn't happened yet, though. When it does, John won't know about it.

John doesn't know about any of this. He isn't paying attention any more.

He takes in the fact that the Woman is having John followed, files it away for later.

"He is coming," she says. "And...her. I have to leave. What do you want to do?"

He blinks against the light. "I'll stay."

There is no need to waste this opportunity. Self-exposure. Isn't that the name of the Woman's game? This is the worst of him. If John sees this, then they can both finally let go.

She nods, hesitates. "I'm sorry," she says. "I assure you it isn't over."

She walks away. His limbs are heavy. He must lie down.

"He made a vow." He doesn't mean to shout but his voice is loud against the quiet dawn and the sound of her heels on the ancient, water-stained wood floor.

She pauses as she reaches the doorway. "As did you," she says over her shoulder.

Her footsteps echo down the stairwell. Hints of understanding crawl spider-like across his skin. She knows. At the wedding, his vow. She was watching. No, not just her. Them. All of them. They're still watching. His mind skips through the day of the wedding, over faces, details of clothing, people's mobile phones out, snapping pictures, recording each moment. How foolish of him to think it was sentiment that motivated them. Layer upon layer of eyes on him, on them. Layer upon layer of lies.

Unbidden Mary's face comes to him, Mary in that dress, Mary in John's arms. The fullness of who Mary is, which is still a mystery. The simplicity of it, how she captured John's heart. There's more there but he can't touch it because he knows he'll get lost.

His limbs are heavy and he wants to sleep, to let the dreams come in. They're beautiful when he is in this place. That's what no one understands.

He must lie down and wait for John.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the shooting.

Evening in the hospital. John has gone home for a change of clothes, but he'll be back. He says he'll be back. Sherlock fades in and out. The morphine covers his physical pain, but it doesn't do much else. Nothing he would like it to do.

A nurse enters the room. Her dark hair is swept back, her movements efficient. She keeps her back to him, fiddles with the flowers on the table by the window. For the first time since Mary shot him, he wants to laugh. Her hips are hard to mistake for anyone else's, even in the somewhat utilitarian skirt of the nurse's uniform.

"Here to console me?" he says.

She turns, her grin wide, lipstick bright red against her feral white teeth. "Console? No. Congratulate, yes."

"By resorting to hospital drag?" He means to tease but he's a thousand pound weight dangling from a worn thread. The morphine drip is turned down as low as he can handle it. She's performing, covering up layers of duplicity in a show for his benefit.

She frowns. "No need to be petulant. I thought you'd be pleased. You've won. You're still on the side of the angels. And now you know exactly what she's capable of."

"There's no way to tell John. I can't." He blinks back tears.

"You have to. She's dangerous. She killed you."

He does laugh. The pain throttles him. He's terrified, briefly, that he's torn something inside. For several long seconds he can't speak.

"As far as I can tell I'm still alive."

"Barely, and only by some miracle." She steps toward the end of the bed, eager, pressing the point. "This is your big chance. Tear through the last of his illusions, and you're that much closer to being where you want to be."

He watches her, eyes tracking the small movements of her hands as they fret against the skirt of her uniform.

"What does your boss think? About me and John. This...project."

She shifts her weight. It's a tell. She's practically squirming. "Boss?"

"Isn't that what you call him? Or is it a 'her' now? Whoever has filled the gap he left."

"Him?"

He closes his eyes. The one word questions are tedious. "The spider." He can't speak as quickly as he would like, so the words come out slowly, unevenly, like he's pouring out coagulated blood. "The only way to build up your insurance as fast as you did was to affiliate yourself with a larger organization. I thought I'd located the core of it: every case he touched seemed to lead back to Eastern Europe. Of course there was always a chance that Eastern Europe was all he chose to show me. Or maybe it's not his network, but it's something new, on a large scale. It has to be big enough to offer you genuine protection or you wouldn't be here. You've been dropping hints, but it's time to tell me. What's the endgame? Why does my personal life figure so large in it?"

She leans back against the wall by the door, sighs. "It's complicated?"

"What's complicated?" John's voice startles Sherlock. He's standing in the doorway, wearing the same clothes he's had on for the last two days. He's holding a plastic Sainsbury's bag that appears to have folded clothes in it. He can't have made it home and back in the fifteen minutes he's been gone. If he had, he would have changed there, showered.

The look on John's face is quizzical. He's watching Sherlock, trying to suss out why he would be engaging in any kind of conversation with a nurse. He's never talked to any of them before. John has glanced at the Woman, not really seen her. Uniforms are a kind of weapon.

"Everything okay?" He steps toward Sherlock. He wears his concern in his upturned brows, the softness of his smile. John is so tender right now, so happy that Sherlock is alive. He's been attentive to a fault.

Pain shoots through Sherlock's chest wall. Something is torn, but it might not be physical.

John frowns, turns toward the Woman. She's standing upright now, waiting.

"Is there a problem with his pain--" John manages before he finally really looks at her.

His voice drops into a low growl. "So you're a nurse now?"

She keeps her eyes on Sherlock. "It's a very popular costume at the moment. All of us girls are wearing it."

_Touché._

"Seriously what are you doing here?" John's voice is rising in pitch and volume. "You were dead. You were supposed to be dead." He looks at Sherlock, back to her. His volume fades. "Well. Aren't you a pair? You're just alike, the both of you."

"John," Sherlock says.

"Did you know?" John asks. His voice cracks. He takes a step toward the bed, as if somehow closing the gap between them will make her go away, will make any betrayal less hurtful. "Did you know she was alive?"

Sherlock watches John's face carefully. Behind John, the Woman shakes her head: no.

"Yes," he says. Tearing down the veils means total truth, in everything. He can't lie to John any more. He'll start with this. "She was scheduled for execution. I saved her. When I told you I was undercover in Brussels, I was really helping her to escape. She was supposed to be in South America but circumstances have changed."

"Brussels?" John says. "You were gone for six days."

"Not that you were keeping track," she says.

John's left hand contracts at his side. "Shut up. Sherlock? You were gone for six days."

He can't hold John's gaze. Whatever he says John will misunderstand. It's the whole of their history together in a nutshell.

"The extraction took some time, and then we needed to go somewhere safe for a while."

John makes a noise that sounds like the word "we" coughed through a brittle pipe the diameter of a pinhole.

"You spent six days alone with her?"

"I assure you we behaved ourselves, or at least, he did," she says. "Although there were some very intimate conversations concerning you, Dr. Watson."

Both of them have their backs to the door, so neither of them sees it when Mary enters the room, her face neutral, her eyes taking in everything immediately. She's cautious. Sherlock knows now that she's trained to be.

Of course she's here. She brought John the change of clothes he's carrying, then went to park the car while he came up to the room. Helpful of her.

"Hello, Sherlock," she says, smile on her face as she takes two steps into the room. "Feeling better?"

"Fine, thanks, Mary." He blinks slowly. "A little tired now."

John hasn't moved. He's standing at the end of the bed, left hand clenched, trembling, hanging on to the metal foot board as if it's the only stable thing in the universe. Mary takes it in, glances at the Woman, looks back to Sherlock.

"Everything okay?"

He nods, watches the two of them, Mary and the Woman.

They're both very good, but he catches it in the way Mary's mouth compresses in one corner and she steps toward John, the way the Woman's eyes open just that much wider before she turns, gathers up the water pitcher resting on the table by the door.

They know each other, and the Woman isn't supposed to be here. Mary is above her in whatever organization they both belong to, but how much higher?

"Take care, Mr. Holmes," the Woman says as she exits.

She's left a single rose in a tall glass vase, a card with "W" printed on it in black ink. She hadn't meant to meet Mary here, yet she doesn't mind letting Mary know she has her hand in. Curiouser and curiouser.

He looks into Mary's eyes. "Her shift is over," he tells her, "but I think she has a second job to get to."

She blinks, smiles wryly. "It's hard for nurses these days."

Mary watches the back of John's head. Her eyes skim down to his clenched hand. She's waiting to understand what, exactly, is bothering him. She steps back toward the doorway. Her hand hovers over the open zip of her purse. She's ready to fight, ready to run.

John snaps back into the room, or possibly into his body, with a sharp intake of breath. He's missed the entirety of the real conversation, but that's probably for the best. One revelation at a time.

"Well," he says with forced lightness, "I'm going to change into these." He holds up the bag, looks at Mary. "Keep him company for a few minutes?"

"Sure, of course." Her voice is so soft for John, so yielding.

John goes into the toilet and closes the door. The sound of water running in the sink comes through. If they keep their voices low, he probably won't hear enough to follow the conversation, but Sherlock is willing to bet that Mary won't take any risks. A long silence stretches out between them. She can't ask the question she most wants to, that much is clear. She already knows it's futile to try to extract promises from him.

The door to the toilet opens and John emerges, wearing his clean clothes. His expression is neutral, cautious.

"That nurse seemed nice," Mary says. "Gorgeous, isn't she? Have you had her before?"

A slow smile crosses his face. Mary knows so much. He finds himself wanting her to know it all. He wants her to see the photo of him and John on the divan at the Woman's house. He wants nothing more than to let her know how much of a threat he could be on every level.

He feels John watching him, waiting for the answer to Mary's question, maybe waiting for the answer to the question he won't ask directly. Whatever he truly wants, it's worth noting that he hasn't given the game away, hasn't displayed his jealousy in front of Mary. He and Sherlock still have their little secret games.

"Never," Sherlock says. "To be honest she's not my type." He looks at John then, and smiles. "'Gorgeous.' If you say so. I suppose you could say that she meets certain societal expectations of female beauty, but I've never noticed myself."

John's entire demeanour changes and his face opens into a smile. His shoulders relax and his breath huffs out in something very close to a chuckle. He's looking at Sherlock as if he's just witnessed a miracle.

Regardless of the Woman's mission, and how that agenda fits or doesn't with Mary's, he sees now that she is right: if there's a chance that he can make John Watson happy, as happy as he looks right now, he has to try. He has to begin somewhere. Unfortunately that will mean shattering the biggest illusion first.

"Well, I'll leave the two of you to your evening," Mary says.

"Oh." John makes a sad noise, but only glances at her briefly before he returns his gaze to Sherlock.

"Thank you for stopping in," Sherlock says as she leans down to place a kiss on his cheek. "Always nice to know there are watchful eyes about."


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Home again.

Early December, a bright cold day, one of the first truly cold days. He walks to the flower shop around the corner from the flat, slowly, gingerly, in deference to his weak muscles, his wounded heart.

He's been out of the hospital for two days now, for which he is genuinely grateful. Baker Street is home again, at least for now, for both of them.

For the sake of his recovery John has been cheerful, bright. The time in the hospital, especially the long months after the confrontation with Mary, allowed them both to take more liberties with touch, with eye contact, with kindness. That has continued since he's been home. John asks him if he's feeling okay, sits next to him on the sofa so they can watch television, helps him lean forward so he can slip a pillow behind his neck, rubs a hand across his low back for no obvious reason at all.

When he thinks Sherlock isn't looking, John lets himself slump, allows the weight of everything that's happened to show in his posture. More than once Sherlock has caught him staring into space, wincing as if he's being taken apart from the inside out.

The inside of the flower shop is warm and damp. The plants create a humidity all their own. At the back is the walk-in cold room with the more fragile cut flowers. He can only remember two occasions on which he's bought flowers, both of them long ago.

John likes daffodils. He comments on them when he sees the first ones blooming in the spring. He's about to ask the middle-aged woman behind the counter if they have any when she walks in.

He steps toward the back of the shop, appears to admire some silk chrysanthemums. She follows.

"Hello," she says. "I trust you're well?"

"In some ways, yes." Something turns in his chest and he finds himself wanting to trust her, wanting to feel the way he did after Karachi, wanting her to be what she seemed then: his dark twin, his diabolical fairy godmother. He and John are closer in some ways than they ever have been, but it's so tenuous. Their whole machinery is built on quicksand. Whatever magic she has, he needs it to be with him.

He doesn't know when, exactly, he turned into a leaky sieve of a human being. He knows it started the day he met John at Bart's, but there must have been some tipping point in this dreadful process of humanization, a point of no return after which he could no longer deny his feelings. When he passed it, he was probably too happy to take note.

"I need your help," she says.

He smiles at the irony.

"You're affiliated with...helpful people. Can't they do something for you?"

She shakes her head. Her gaze is serious. She's serious.

Well. An exchange, then. He can live with that.

She pulls a folded newspaper page from her pocket. It's one of Magnussen's papers. She points to a small item in the lower left hand corner. He's already seen it, committed it to memory, scheduled it for deletion three days from now if it doesn't seem to be going anywhere interesting.

He waves the paper away. "Allegations launched against Daniel Bennett, who runs a home for troubled youth. The article makes vague claims that as a former prostitute himself he should never have been placed in such a position. An overly general reference to sources, not cited here of course, that might implicate him in sexual acts with minors. Police possibly investigating."

The story is typical for one of Magnussen's papers. Chances are it's a first foray into blackmail. Daniel Bennett possibly has something that Magnussen wants. More likely he has access to someone Magnussen wants to control.

"Daniel Bennett is Kate's brother," she says. "Magnussen is trying to put pressure on me. He wants back into the network. He used to be a part of it, after a fashion, but things went sour for him after--"

After the spider died.

The shopkeeper is watching them. He scans her posture for possible threats, checks to ensure the hand she has thrust into her apron pocket isn't holding a phone or some other kind of weapon.

The shopkeeper pulls a pair of scissors from the pocket, continues wrapping a bouquet of snapdragons. She is what she appears to be, he decides, allowing his muscles to relax. Based on the way she's leaning forward across the counter, it's only a matter of time before she comes over and offers them help. He picks up a silk peony, runs his fingertips over its petals, leans in as if he's discussing it with her.

"Why should I help a member of the organization that ruined my reputation and nearly ended my life twice?"

"You talk about it like none of us care about you."

He raises his eyebrows at that.

"I'm not proud of myself for once," she says through gritted teeth, "but ask your brother about my track record since I've been back. That's if you need some reason to help us."

It's her use of the word _us_ that levels his righteous indignation. Whatever mess the Woman's gotten herself into, whatever her affiliations, Kate probably doesn't deserve it. He'll reserve judgement on the brother.

"Maybe," he says, scanning the shop, his eyes falling on some potted African violets. High maintenance, like him. He's rapidly tiring and he wants to go home and start work right away. At the very least, it's worth investigating. Any chance to foil Magnussen holds substantial appeal.

There are no daffodils here. Of course there aren't. Winter hasn't really even begun yet. In the front window there's a display of Christmas cactus in bloom. Somehow a cactus seems more John-appropriate. He smiles as he wonders what he will say to John about it as he selects one. They've never tried to have houseplants at Baker Street. At least this one can handle some neglect. He heads to the front of the shop to pay.

Out on the street, he pulls his coat collar up. He's too tired now, too cold.

She takes his elbow. "You will try, won't you?"

"For Kate," he says.

She watches him steadily, her mouth forming a thin line of defiance, her brow arching. He pulls the silk peony from the bag. "Give this to her. Tell her I said hello."

She takes it with mischief dancing in her eyes, refrains from putting it between her teeth. He allows himself to smile.

She stares at something further down the street, the look of amusement on her face mingling with concern. "Looks like you'll have company for the walk home."

John stands at the end of the block, his green coat open over his jumper despite the cold. His breath huffs out in visible clouds against the air. His left hand, which has been doing better, is balling into a fist and twitching open again like it's got a life of its own. He does not move toward them.

"Goodbye," she says. "Thank you."

John paces, still not moving any closer. Whatever he needs to do now, whatever he needs to say, Sherlock can't rush. His body simply will not move any faster and he is forced to cover the half block in painstaking slow steps while John seethes and frets and his face grows more red.

Sherlock waits until he's only a few feet away before he speaks. He can't project his voice. The pain in his chest won't let him. "John."

"I saw your note," John says, his voice barely controlled. "You never leave a note. So you wanted me to see that, yeah?" He hasn't sounded this enraged since the day Sherlock returned.

"I didn't want you to worry when you came home and found me gone."

John laughs. "When did you ever--"

Right. When did he ever care? "Let's go home. We shouldn't talk about it here."

John paces like a trapped animal, sticking to a single concrete square of sidewalk.

"John. I'm tired."

"You?" John stops moving, his hand taking up the rhythm of his anger. "You're tired. Not too tired to go see her. Not too tired for this. You know? I'm tired too. No one lets me in on the bloody truth. You and her, right? Is that what it's been? The two of you and your smug jokes behind my back?"

A young mother with a baby in a pushchair is trying to get past John. She eyes him, hesitates.

"John," Sherlock says, points.

He gets it and he moves aside, still seething. The flimsy arrangement, the tenuous domesticity of the last two days, the last several months, is capsizing, falling into the centre of the earth, where it will inevitably burn and crumble.

John walks in a circle, turning his back on Sherlock, face upturned to the sky. His every muscle is poised for a fight.

"It isn't what you think, John. Please let's just go home."

John stops pacing, looks at him, mouth fixed in something not at all like a smile. He swallows like he's gagging on something foul.

"I'm tired, John. Please. I need to--please take me home."

The journey back is slower than the trip out. It's nothing, a distance he would have covered without thought before. Now it seems to take forever.

Once they're inside, John removes his coat, absurdly pauses to help Sherlock off with his. He doesn't ask after what's in the bag, carries it up the stairs in his clenched fist while he lets Sherlock pull himself up by the railing, one step at a time.

In the flat, John shuts the door. Sherlock lowers himself onto the sofa, wincing as his sternum grinds. He went too far. He did too much. Still he's dying to text Mycroft, to start researching Daniel Bennett. Either of those projects would be preferable to the hell of John's anger and accusations.

John waits until Sherlock is settled, then pulls out the coffee table just enough to sit on it, his knees inches from Sherlock's. He looms above him, a ruthless judge, his anger emanating from him in waves. He doesn't speak. Sherlock glances at John's hands, clenched together. He knows John's tricks: this is an attempt to keep the left one from spasming.

Any explanation won't be enough, but he has to try. "I didn't know she would be there. She has a case."

John is breathing hard. "What case."

Sherlock blinks. If he looks at John's face, he is not sure what he'll see there. This rage is nothing he wants. He's deserved some of this, there have been things he's done that certainly deserved anger, but not this.

 _That's passion_. Is it? It's terrifying. Every nerve ending is on fire with it. It's a hot wire playing over the entire surface of his skin.

"Kate's brother. You remember Kate? Her...the Woman's Kate?"

"Yes."

"It's Magnussen. He's working on Kate's brother, threatening him."

"So?"

"John." He wonders when he became the one with the moral compass. "I thought you would care."

John makes a tortured noise in the back of his throat. "You think I don't?"

Enough. He wants John, but not like this. Not in this trapped animal way. Their whole world has contracted around them, enemies on all sides, ambiguous alliances, and now it's becoming obvious that John doesn't trust him at all. Although why that should be.

"John I don't know what to say."

"Lie. Tell me there's nothing." He stops, clears his throat, rubs his face with his good hand. "Tell me there's nothing going on with you and that criminal."

He raises his gaze. John's face is broken, his anger turning into something else. Maybe this is the veil, tearing. It feels more like they're both coming apart. His body aches and all he feels is his exhaustion coming down in waves and absolute sorrow for what they've done to each other. He's already died on the edge of the rooftop of Bart's and died playing a waltz at John's wedding and died watching Sholto, knowing what was clear and obvious, that Sholto and John weren't just friends, that John had done much more than he'd ever let on. So many more deductions that day than he'd ever wanted to perform. He's already crawled back to something like life for John on more than one occasion. This time, John will have to figure it out on his own.

He waits, and he watches. John shifts on the coffee table, but does not move away.

The Woman would know what to say. The Woman would know what John likes. She claims she does know, but it's impossible, what she claims isn't real, but some fairy tale that only exists when she's there and speaking to Sherlock. It's probably why he will never truly let go of her. She represents the beautiful illusion.

He should explain this to John, who is staring at him with something like desperation. He wants nothing more than to let John off this hook, but he can't. He knows if he does it will diffuse the energy that's crackling between them, and he doesn't want to do that. He wants John to feel it. He wants John to act.

John leans forward and Sherlock flinches, but John pushes in, grabs Sherlock's face and kisses him on the lips, his mouth pressing hard into Sherlock's, a whine in the back of John's throat. He's pressing himself into Sherlock, and it's happening, this is really happening. It's painful and his chest is bursting with the pain of John's weight but he gives in. It's what he wants. It's a version of what he wants.

John pushes him sideways, lays him out on the sofa and climbs on top of him, one hand running down Sherlock's side, pulling his shirt out of his trousers and pawing at the bare skin there. John is grinding into him and he's falling down through the sofa into a thick sea of pain and the anchor is John's teeth tearing at the corner of his lips, John's tongue in his mouth, John's hands on him, John's rage and desperation.

He reaches for John, reaches up to touch his face, but John stops his hand with his elbow, pinning Sherlock's arm down. "No," he hisses into Sherlock's open mouth, "don't move. Don't fucking move."

They're caught in this moment, Sherlock wheezing like a rabbit in a snare, John raging into him, pouring all of his frustration into him.

The smallest thing shifts it. His body is straining for John and to be out from under John. John stares down into his face and Sherlock can't help it, his sternum flexes along the line of his incision and he winces, a tear leaks out of the corner of his eye.

John moves away, scrambling back as if Sherlock's an open flame. His back presses into the arm of the sofa and he wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, absolute horror on his face.

 Sherlock scrambles to find words. He can't take a breath for the pain. It's the worst thing. It's a travesty of what he thought it would be, and all he wants right now is for John to come back, to touch him, even to kill him so it can finally be over.

The next thing he knows the door slams and he hears John running down the stairs and out onto the street.

His phone pings. It's a text alert. After a few more minutes he manages to pull the phone from his pocket.

It's from Mycroft: _You can trust her_.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Home without him.

He spends the next forty-eight hours alone, researching Daniel Bennett. He wants to move faster but he keeps needing to sleep. When he does sleep it's fitful, disturbed. The pain keeps him floating just below wakefulness. He dreams the sound of the door of the flat opening and closing, over and over. It's never John. Mrs. Hudson comes up a few times to check on him, to bring him food which he does not refuse. He cannot go back to the hospital now. 

He combs through police reports, news archives. He sends Wiggins out to talk to a few select hotel managers and one retired cleaning woman. Lestrade brings him files, leaves them on the desk, eyes the bruise on the corner of his mouth but doesn't ask.

Kate and Daniel are orphans, part of the foster system since she was five and he was three. It surprises him. Kate has always struck him as rather posh, but then again, spending time with the Woman probably rubs off in more ways than one.

Daniel Bennett was fifteen when he started selling himself. At age sixteen, Daniel and another teenage prostitute made a sex tape. According to court records their plan was to make enough money that they could stop turning tricks. The tape caught the attention of police and they were both sent to Ashfield, two years apiece in the worst prison in the country.

Daniel Bennet has worked tirelessly on behalf of troubled boys. As far as Sherlock can tell, the only time he had sex with a minor was when he was one himself.

He's combing through prison incident reports during the years of Daniel's incarceration when his phone rings. He checks the ID, hoping it is John.

It isn't.

"Yes?" he says.

"Please come." Her voice is heavy, with none of her customary humour.

"Why?"

"Daniel's killed himself."


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before Christmas.

They send a car for him. He doesn't object. He doesn't ask where they're taking him. When they arrive at the back door of a spa that can only be described as exclusive and discreet, he exits the car, walks the short distance up the sidewalk. His steps are slow. His chest still aches.

The Woman greets him in a hallway, takes his coat. Her face is marred by grief, dark circles under her eyes.

"Kate?" he asks.

She shakes her head. "Upstairs. Sleeping. Well, unconscious. She didn't want to be awake any more."

He nods.

"We're alone here," she says. "I know the owner. We needed a place that wasn't being watched." She nods at the one open doorway, further down the hall.

"Good."

She grasps his arm, pulls him aside, whispers. "He's here. We--" she purses her lips.

This has his brother all over it. As Sherlock suspected, Mycroft and the Woman have been working together for some time now. He waits for her to continue.

"Mycroft found him. He was in a hotel. I don't think he's slept. I won't ask what happened," she says, fingers brushing the corner of his lip. "Something, I think." Her eyebrows ask the question anyway.

He studies the polished brass doorknob, the fleur de lis patterned wallpaper. He can't answer.

"Ah," she says.

The room contains four comfortable chairs, one of which is occupied by John. He looks rumpled and small, his hands clutching the cushioned arms as if he's being electrocuted. He is pale. He doesn't look up as Sherlock enters.

Mycroft stands in the far corner, murmuring to his assistant. The Woman follows Sherlock in, shuts the door.

"What's all this?" Sherlock asks.

Mycroft looks up from the file his assistant is holding. "We are here, little brother, to inform you that whatever you are planning against Magnussen, you must not continue."

"Are you? You could have done that from anywhere. A text would have sufficed."

Mycroft wears his usual expression, somewhere between impatience and toothache.

"Sherlock, if you pursue a personal vendetta against this man, you will be compromising an operation the size and scope of which you cannot conceive. He is peripheral at best to the matter at hand, and as you know, incredibly dangerous. Say you will give up your plans."

John shifts uncomfortably, loosens his grip on the chair enough to rub his mouth with the back of his hand.

"What has John got to do with it? Why is he here?"

John continues to stare at the floor as if it has personally threatened him.

Mycroft clears his throat. "Will you promise?"

Sherlock needs, more than anything else, for John to look at him, talk to him. He will say whatever's necessary to take the most direct route there. "Very well."

Mycroft nods. "Good. We have more important matters at hand. A certain criminal organization of which Miss Adler has made herself a part."

She steps forward into the room. "It's a family business, brother and sister at the top. None of us have met them. We just...take orders. Subtle things. At least, the things I've been asked to do have seemed rather inconsequential." She looks at John, who still studies the floor. Presumably everyone in the organization hasn't had such subtle assignments.

"Yes but why is John here? What have I missed?"

They must have been discussing Mary. That much is obvious. What new information could they have? The jump drive proved to contain only a few fabricated files with entirely false claims about her past. They passed it on to Mycroft months ago.

John slips his hand into his jacket pocket, wraps it around something small. So.

"There's an imbalance at the heart of the organization," Mycroft says. "We might be on the cusp of an opportunity to infiltrate and dismantle."

John shifts in his chair, clears his throat. He stands. "I'll tell him. I'll explain. Can we go now?"

Mycroft blinks at John. "It's very important that you are clear on the situation. Its precise nature."

"I've got it," John says.

Back at Baker Street John sits in his chair, but he can't sit still. Sherlock lowers himself down into his own chair. John looks as though he's about to leap out of his.

There is too much to talk about, too much to say. Business as usual. Nothing will be said. Nothing will be done, and they'll carry on forward into perpetual discontent, separation, destruction.

John sniffs, studies the floor to his left. Sherlock waits.

"Yeah I've got to go back," John says, after long minutes have passed.

Sherlock can't think what John means at first. He blinks at the empty air as he wonders if John has left something at the spa. Then he understands. The floor opens up underneath his chair and although he is frozen and does not move, he falls through the floor, straight into the dank carpet of the empty basement flat, then down into the drains, down into the earth. He can't speak.

John sits forward and covers his eyes. He can't look at what he's doing. At least he loves Sherlock that much. "It's the baby," he says. "What she's doing is dangerous and might--" He pauses again, for a long time. "If I go back then she won't be able to do as much as she has been. She'll have to pretend. And maybe then there's a chance. It might--Mycroft thinks it would help."

Sherlock blinks into open space.

John's voice is breaking as he says the next thing, the thing Sherlock has dreaded. "I promised, Sherlock. I made vows."

He made vows to a woman who didn't exist. There is, still, unfortunately, this person who wears her face, who carries John's child.

Is this the way it's to be? John and the woman who nearly killed him. John going back to her, after what he did on the sofa, to Sherlock. With Sherlock.

 _Lie. Tell me there's nothing going on between you and that criminal._ Now John's going back to his own criminal.

He has to say something, so he gives John what John would never give him. "I understand."

John shifts uncomfortably in his chair again. He looks at Sherlock, briefly, his eyes full of something terrible. "I wish you wouldn't." He says it so quietly, from the back of his throat. He's choking on it.

Sherlock blinks. He blinks himself back into the room, back into the light, back into his right mind. It's ridiculous for John to ask him not to understand. Understanding is the one thing he's always had. The one thing on which he can rely.

There is something in John's tone. There was something in the way he dismissed Mycroft. What he says is true: he made vows, yes, he did. He must go back. If he says so. But what is John's truth? Sherlock can't guess. He doesn't dare.

"What did Mycroft say to you?" He sits forward. If there's a puzzle to solve here, he'll help John solve it, so John can have what he wants, whatever that is. So John can be free. That has always been the goal.

John shakes his head, clears his throat. "She's been busy. Trying to gain leverage, which means a lot of assignments. She's travelled a lot. She's killed. She's killed a lot of people." He looks at Sherlock, hangs on to his gaze for long seconds before he tears his eyes away. _Yes_ , Sherlock thinks. _She killed me first. Now she's killing you._

This is a game they're playing together. Sherlock knows this. It's a game they've always played. It has many names: _I love you but not in the way that would make me most happy. You're the most important thing in the world to me and that terrifies me. I will sacrifice everything for you, especially myself_. He is not sure how, or why, but he knows John is playing it now, playing it harder than he ever has.

 _If you ever get the chance to dance with him, take it_. They have danced. They have held each other here, in this very room, and laughed, and joked. They have danced each others' deaths and saved each others' lives. This dance, the one that's happening right now, is more important than any of those others.

John is lying to him. Sherlock will lie as well, will pretend, so John can dance his way back to him, if that is what he decides he truly wants, when all of this is over.

In the meantime, if he wants Mary, then so be it. Maybe he thinks he can stop her and make her into the person he wants her to be.

Sherlock knows with absolute certainty, if that is the case,  John will fail. The sooner John goes back, the sooner he tries, the sooner he will be moving back toward Sherlock, toward home. _All roads lead back to you_.

"When do you have to go back?"

John's mouth gapes. "Soon."

If Sherlock were feeling better he would be jumping out of his chair, pacing the floor. They must make this work. John is no performer but if given the right things to say, the right gestures, he might be convincing in the role of the dutiful, besotted husband. Regardless of what John truly wants, what he thinks he's trying to accomplish, he must make Mary believe he wants her back, or his life will be in danger.

"Can it wait until Christmas? There's nothing like a big holiday reconciliation."

"Sherlock."

Sherlock feels a smile creeping across his features. He allows it, eyes sparkling. "Yes, it should be Christmas. For the sake of holding our little family together." He ignores the way John's face reddens and carries on. "It should be my parents' place. They've invited us, you know. To celebrate Christmas."

The arrangement with Magnussen sits in Sherlock's heart like a shining pearl. Because of Daniel, he wants more than anything to follow through with the plans he made on behalf of John, to take the hideous pressure of Mary's past off John. This might be perfect, he thinks. John and Mary can have their scene, and he and John will slay a dragon together. Mary will be pacified, Magnussen fallen, and John can have whatever he wants.

He dances on the knife edge. They are both dancing on the knife edge of having everything and losing everything. He is almost delirious with the risk of it. If there was nothing to lose, if it were easy, it wouldn't thrill him this much.

If John comes back to him, it will be his greatest triumph.

A slow devastation seeps into John's features. "If you think so."

He takes a deep breath. His chest pains him. "I do."

"I'm sorry," John says, and buries his face in his hands.

Sherlock watches the top of John's head. John is breathing hard, heaving like he's going to be sick.

_See? Almost there._

He tries, and succeeds, in keeping all mockery out of his tone. It has no place here. He wants to know, genuinely wants to know. "What for?" 

John clears his throat. He stands, walks toward the kitchen, comes back into the sitting room, hovers, half turned toward the door. "I know I don't deserve anything. I know I don't deserve it. Please don't make me say it. Please just forgive me."


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before Christmas.

December 23rd, the eve of Christmas eve. Tomorrow, Sherlock will go to Mary, will drop by the home that she and John made together. He will invite her to Christmas at his parents' house. He will ask nicely. He will give her the beautiful letter that John wrote by hand. He will convince her to come. On Christmas, John will make his apology, and Sherlock will end Magnussen's claim on them, on all of them.

In the days since John made his decision, they have been busy. Mycroft sends files about the network, information on certain loan sharks, certain drug cartels, and, to Sherlock's mild surprise, at least one pharmaceutical company. He talks through it all with John, who listens and nods, his teeth clenched, his mind somewhere else.

They share spartan meals, made hastily. John does not arrange to touch him, casually or otherwise. They do not decorate the flat for Christmas. They do not have anyone in for drinks.

The Woman texts him in the early evening. "Merry End of the World, Mr. Holmes."

John becomes restless. He paces the flat, straightening things. He organizes the files on the coffee table. He tidies the desk. He barely speaks. Sherlock is less perpetually exhausted, in much less physical pain, but he still needs to make sure he sleeps often, and tonight he cannot be in the same room with John, with John's frantic energy.

He tells John he's going to bed early. John nods, gets his coat. "Just going for a walk," he says. It's the longest sentence he's said all day.

It's well past midnight when Sherlock hears the bedroom door open, hears John's footsteps across the floor, feels John's weight settle on the edge of the bed.

Sherlock's eyes are open. He is lying on his side, turned away from John. He is not sure if he should move. Some spells you shouldn't break.

John clears his throat gently. He sits for a long time. He isn't touching Sherlock, but he is close.

"Christ," John says. His voice is broken, low. "Please don't say anything. Please don't. Just listen."

Sherlock stares into the darkness. His breathing changes. It catches. John will know by this sign that he is awake, that he is listening.

"You need to know that it's not your fault, all of this. I'm so sorry."

The bed shakes a little. John is breathing hard. He doesn't speak for some time.

"When you came back, I should have done something. I was so angry. You know that, but I was frightened, too. The things I thought about, when I thought you were dead. I let myself think about all the things we never." He clears his throat again. "You don't know how much I regretted never telling you, what you meant to me."

John's voice is a harsh whisper, a rattle, felt more than heard, that comes from somewhere in his chest.

"There are things I meant to tell you, that I wished I could tell you, when you were gone. And when you came back, I just couldn't. I don't know how to do this with you. All of this never seemed quite real to me."

The speech is broken. John is breaking open, and Sherlock doesn't dare move, doesn't dare change course. All of it: John's plan, the letter John has written, the deal Sherlock has made with Magnussen, the scenarios Mycroft has spun together with the Woman's help, it all depends on their agreement to move forward, to move into this fraught, ugly future.

"I have to go. I have to see it through. But I need you to know I wish things were different. I don't know if they could have been. I don't know if it's anything you could want. And Jesus, Sherlock, I'm sorry for what I did to you. With men I've never talked, just taken. I don't know how this works. If there was time to figure it out, I would try. Even if you never--"

John's voice finally gives way under the pressure, and he sits on the edge of the bed, gently shaking.

Sherlock is terrified to move, but he must. John isn't sure. John doesn't know. How this can be, how Sherlock can have overlooked this one thing, he has no idea.

He can't allow John's illusions, the last of his illusions, that Sherlock doesn't want him, to remain unbroken. If he gives just a little, then John will see. Just enough, so that John doesn't have to feel so alone.

He rolls onto his back, then turns to face John. John's hand is over his eyes, his breath hitching. His other hand clutches the sheet.

Sherlock places his fingers over John's hand. The timing is wrong and the sentiment is wrong and the circumstances are dreadful, but the feeling of John's hand under his, not pulling away, but squeezing the sheet a little less tightly, is exactly right.

There is time, Sherlock thinks, right now. Nothing has happened yet. The letter has not been given to Mary and Sherlock hasn't asked her to come to Christmas very nicely or in any other way. Magnussen hasn't sent his helicopter and Wiggins's drugs have yet to be doled out. John's gun is still in his room upstairs and he isn't reconciling with his villainous wife. He is here. Time will push them forward tomorrow, but not yet, not now. They are here together.

John is still completely rigid. Sherlock moves his hand over John's, opening his fingers, pressing his palm to the back of John's hand.

John sighs raggedly, and turns his hand over, allows Sherlock's palm to press against his. They hold there. The single point of contact is everything. Sherlock has never been soft with anyone, not like this, but he stays there for John. He waits for John. He will always wait.

John lets his hand fall from his eyes. His face is shadowed in the darkened room, but he looks at Sherlock. He reaches out, pushes his fingers into Sherlock's hair. Their hands still hold.

Sherlock blinks up at him, trying to see through the shadows.

"Christ," John says. He leans down over Sherlock, and presses his lips to Sherlock's forehead. John's lips are dry. He breathes into Sherlock's hair, breathes over him, warm and broken.

Then he's standing, he's moving away. He holds Sherlock's hand for a moment longer.

"If there was time," he says. "If I didn't have to go back." The words are choked, like all of John's words.

A slow bloom of rich, warm poison moves through Sherlock's chest and belly as John leaves the room, closes the door. It's possible there will never be time, Sherlock knows. When they had time, they wasted it, and then the world tore them away from each other.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Christmas.

Another courtyard, this one distinctly English. A fine dusting of snow has come down overnight. Four walls surround the small patch of lawn and collection of rose bushes. It's a tiny world under a leaden sky, a world of thorns and not much else.

He tries to be grateful that he's here. It's a fine place to await consequences. It's all Mycroft's doing, of course. The staff are his people, and only behave like prison guards when he tries to head for an exterior door.

It's the tenth day of his incarceration when she appears. Her boots crunch on the frost-covered grass. She wears a mink coat with a fox fur collar. Appropriate gear for a sadist.

He's only mildly surprised to see her. No doubt she knows what someone on the staff likes. "I'm assuming you weren't able to smuggle in some weaponry, or something I could use to pick a lock or two," he says by way of greeting.

She reaches her hand more deeply into her pocket. "I only have these, I'm afraid." She hands him a few crumpled paper receipts.

He doesn't try to suppress his smile as he takes them. "Ah. This is good."

"Good?"

He takes her arm, leads her back into the building, up the stairs and down the short corridor to his room. Under the window there's a sturdy oak chest of drawers. On it lie a collection of eighty-four receipts. He shuffles the new ones into place, stands back so he can read the whole of it again, with the new words in place.

"Each one has a number circled, and at least one letter." Her huge eyes take in the table top. She's trying to read them. She's clever but it won't help her here. "It's a code," she says. 

"A cipher, technically. Vigenère. Unlike a simple Caesar shift, which substitutes one letter for another--"b" for "a," "c" for "b" and so on--each letter in a Vigenère is translated according to a different shift. Sometimes "b" is "a", but then again sometimes "q" is "a," in which case "r" is "b," and so on. The key is based on a word known only to me and John." A smile plays across his lips. "See here, he's circled decimals as well, so I have some idea where one thought stops and the next begins. The message is rather simple, really."

A fine line of tension runs through her, then subsides: the question she knows not to ask.

"The truly clever part is that he's gotten these to me out of order, mostly through the cook, who shops daily down the street from John's clinic. John's worked very hard to keep it as difficult as possible for anyone who isn't me to decode this. Of course, now that it's almost complete, anyone with access to this room could take a photo of it and run it through a computer program. I think John imagines I'm eating each piece of paper upon memorizing it."

She frowns. "Why aren't you? Besides the potential for indigestion of course."

He looks out through the window. It opens directly onto the small courtyard. There is a small risk, or would be, if there were any chance he could be allowed to stay here. There isn't. He's bound on a path that leads inevitably toward death, away from home and John.

He smiles. "I suppose I'm harmless enough now. And John is doing well, I suppose, with Mary."

She laughs softly. "Yes. At least that facade still stands."

"Does it?"

She smiles, studies the tiny, fragile slips of paper strewn across the table. "As much as it needs to. So long as she can fall back on her identity as doctor's wife, she'll keep it, and him. Fortunate for the world. Whether it's fortunate for him is a matter of perspective, I suppose."

The room is stifling. He would like to crack the window, but any breeze might scatter the slips of paper and that he couldn't abide, not when the message is so nearly complete. He runs the cipher in his head again, translating the new parts along with those he's already commited to memory. Even if it all ends tomorrow, he'll have this. John Watson is as safe as he can be, and he's holding Mary back with the power of his wedding vows and the power of appearances.

"I'll leave you to your reading, then," she says, slipping her arm back through his. She leans in and kisses his cheek.

This is probably the last time he will see her. "Thank you."

She pauses at the door. He's not inclined to say more but he knows she's waiting and he wants to give her something. "You were right. I think he always--I think it was."

"A chemical defect?"

"Yes."

"Yours and his."

She is bright against the darkened hallway, even in her black coat. She has always been luminous. He knows he'll miss her, miss this. "Evidently."

"Not so bad then? Being on the losing side?"

The smile comes involuntarily, yanked out of his core along with so much else: gratitude, regret, and the happiness that can only come from knowing it wasn't futile after all. It was real. "I wouldn't be anywhere else."

Her heels click down the long hallway and fade. In the distance a heavy door opens and closes. He runs his hand across the edge of the table and studies the slips of paper again.

It isn't a beautiful handwritten letter. It's better, something John has worked on, thought through. It's a puzzle. It's _the_ puzzle.

It's complete enough. Even if tomorrow is the day, he knows enough, has enough.

_the real game was us.  I ... that now.  this ... in its not mine.  home is ... you.  you and I never ... your ... name. words don't cover it. I know you ... for me. even though you can't ... I'm with you._


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the four-minute exile.

He picks up his violin. He puts it down, lays it across the desk, thumbs the strings without plucking them. He's replicating a physical sensation. It isn't that he's not in the mood for music. This is music, of a kind.

It's been three days since the tarmac, since the plane returned him to England, to John. Since then he's been living on the memory of John's shit-eating grin, John's laughter while Mary stood sour-faced beside him, her hand clutched firmly to John's.

He hasn't heard from John since. His mere presence here puts John in jeopardy but John is clever. John will do what he must and then he will find his way back here, so they can finally talk. There might be a later after all. There might be time.

Three days. Three things sustain him:

John, climbing into the back seat of the car Mycroft had sent to collect him and Mary, and sitting in the middle, asking Sherlock if he was coming back to town with them as if it were perfectly normal for them to sit squeezed together, John's knee pressing into Sherlock's while Mary climbed in the other side.

John reaching for the seat belt buckle, his fingers finding Sherlock's hand, briefly running across the pad of his thumb while John looked the other way.

John, casually reminding Mary to call David back. "He's called three times since yesterday. Really wants to get hold of you, I think."

Footsteps climb the stairs outside the door to his flat. It won't be John, not yet. John is clever. John must be careful.

The knock is gentle.

"Come in," he says.

Kate eases the door open, looks around the edge. She's wearing a simple cotton dress, navy blue, under a white jacket. Nautical-ish. Her hair is pinned back. It's longer. She's lost weight. Still mourning then. Of course she is. If he lost--anyone close to him--he would mourn for the rest of his days.

She carries a small gift bag. "Hello," she says. "It's been some time."

"It has." He takes her by the elbows, kisses her cheek.

She smiles, looks down, and hands him the bag. "She's out of town. She wanted you to have this. Not a tie pin."

He smiles; she's being familiar. It's nice. "Would you like to sit?" he asks. "Tea?" He wants to offer her the things he didn't think to the last time she was here. He wants to offer her more than he did when she and Daniel could have used his help.

"I can't stay long," she says. "There's a timeline."

He tilts his head, runs through all he's noticed since she walked in. Everything about her is carefully composed, except for the faint black smudge across the knuckles of her left hand. She's done something--mechanical? Her pale blue nail polish is chipped on her index finger, but it looks fresh otherwise. Prying something apart then.

He considers her words. Not _I have to be somewhere_. Not _I have an appointment_. Not _I'm on a schedule_.

_There's a timeline_.

"Open it." She's still smiling. It doesn't reach her eyes.

He removes a small white cardboard box from the bag. Inside is a tiny black circular object, almost like a gear, plastic, nestled on a piece of white cotton. Thin cut wires like threads extend from it. He's seen it before, but not out in the open like this.

It's one of the four small explosive devices from the Woman's phone, or just like one of those. He looks at Kate, raises an eyebrow.

"She said you would understand. Don't worry. This one won't actually go off. I defused it myself."

"I see."

_There's a timeline_. Something is going to happen. Something the Woman has arranged. Something explosive. _It's more me_.

His phone pings in his pocket.

Kate smiles. "Goodbye." She lets herself out. Always walking away, the Woman and the woman she loves.

The message is from John: _Stay where you are. I'm coming._

He looks at the tiny device where it sits on the coffee table in its nest of white cotton. _This one won't go off_. His phone with John's message on it feels too warm and heavy in his hand.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When he came home.

Sherlock lingers by the window. He wants to watch John walking up the street; he wants to watch John coming home. John is not here yet.

The Christmas cactus sits on the window sill. It has not yet lost its bloom. He has surprised himself by looking after it well. He supposes it's as full of anticipation as he is. Flowers are a form of optimism, an expectation and an offering.

He paces the length of the sitting room. The Woman's gift still sits on the coffee table. It's a warning, surely. A promise of danger. He skims over facts he should probably attend to. John didn't have to ask if he was home. John knew. Someone told him, then. The Woman has an investment in him and John, in their life together, which sometimes seems to be fueled by friendship, sometimes by something else entirely. _There's a timeline_.

The time for him and John isn't ripe yet, isn't here. First they must deal with Mary. First they must make sure John is safe.

His body and mind are aflame with the possibility in John's words. _Stay where you are. I'm coming._ It's been three days and he has smouldered the entire time, and now those words are setting him on fire and he finds he doesn't care about the Woman's timeline or the tiny black explosive in its nest of cotton, inconspicuous among the newpapers and empty teacups piled on the coffee table.

His mind skitters over the potential for danger and, unable to think what might happen when John arrives, he tips over the edge into the mundane.

He should clean up. It's utterly unnecessary because John has seen the flat in all states of mess and cleanliness, and he won't care, but still. He is just reaching for a plate that held toast two mornings ago when he hears the front door bang open and John comes running up the stairs.

John stands in the sitting room doorway, his coat open, mouth open, breath heaving, three steps away, watching him. Sherlock puts the plate down where it was and waits. He's aware that his shirt is tight across his chest and stomach. He wants to loosen it at the collar but he doesn't know how that will look. He settles on being frozen in place.

This is no longer about strategy. There is no strategy now. This is no longer about confessions. They've said everything. Or haven't said, but thought, felt, known. Somehow he thought there would be words, there would be things to say, but now he knows it's all about being here, together, alone, and stripped, yes, utterly stripped of pretense and barriers and illusions about who they are outside of this. Neither of them are outside of it. They're in it and there is no escape.

John says, "I don't care any more" as he closes the gap between them, coat slipping from one shoulder.

Sherlock only has time to note that John's coat pocket is heavy on one side before John's hands are on his face and neck. John pulls him down, pulls Sherlock's mouth to his mouth and their lips are on each other's, mouths sliding and pressing and John's lips are firm, sure, and it's exactly what it should be.

In the weeks since the last time, Sherlock has healed considerably. He's physically strong now and he knows he can fight, knows he could fight John despite John's wiry strength and that means he can match John now. He smiles against John's mouth, his hands moving across John's throat and down to the top of his striped t-shirt, over John's chest and he pushes John back, into the corridor that leads to his bedroom, and up against the wall, tugging the coat down and off John's arms.

Something clunks, heavy and metallic, as the coat lands on the wooden floor.

Sherlock can't help looking down, even with John breathing warm across his throat. The handle of John's gun is just sticking out of the pocket. He raises his eyebrows, looks back at John, whose eyes are bright and dark all at once, whose hand is sliding over Sherlock's waist, the other gripping the back of his neck.

John shrugs, returns to kissing Sherlock's neck, biting and sucking on his jaw.

Sherlock laughs. Of course John brought his gun. Neither of them is safe from Mary or the network and as for Moriarty, who knows?

They're endangering themselves, each other, but finally it's not because of what lies between them, and that delights him. Some deep internal pressure he hadn't been aware of lifts suddenly, and his breath swoops out of him against John's mouth, and the buttons of his shirt are all undone and John's fingers slide beneath the waistband of his trousers and he presses himself into John, against John's hand, and he gasps with the thrill of it.

He pulls the back of John's shirt up and over John's head. John pulls it off the rest of the way himself, breaking contact with Sherlock only to draw him back in again. Sherlock grinds against John and there is John's erection, huge and hard against Sherlock's hip bone. John groans as Sherlock presses his hand into John's lower back, pushing into him as hard as he can, pressing John into the wall. For long moments they kiss and hold and press in slow, aching millimeters, the length of Sherlock's body flattening John into the wall, all spaces between them closed.

Sherlock wants this to go on forever but he's learned some things. He smiles into John's mouth and he pulls away, a small space between them now. Both of them are panting and John's smile is curious, his eyes bleeding with need.

Sherlock wants to show John that he can work gaps and absences as well as anybody now; he can work them for John's pleasure. He strides down the corridor to his room without a word. John scrambles after him, practical John, who leaves their shirts on the floor where they've fallen but picks up his coat and brings it with him. He pulls the gun from the coat pocket and places it on the floor by the leg of the bedside table, just tucked out of view.

Sherlock notes John's choice: the gun is present, its location known to both of them, but it's out of the line of sight of anyone who might enter this room through the main door, the toilet door, or the window. None of the implications matter at all as John lets the coat fall to the floor and Sherlock steps out of his trousers.

Sherlock pushes John hard onto the bed. John stumbles and falls onto his back, grinning now as Sherlock falls onto him, over him, bracing himself over John with one arm as he tugs open John's jeans.

John allows Sherlock to undress him, lifting his hips so that Sherlock can pull everything down and off. John is gloriously naked now, warm and full and writhing beneath him, and everything stutters as he realizes that they're here, and it's finally right. His eyes skim John's belly and chest and rest on his face, which has fallen.

John licks his lips and presses them together. The downward curve of his mouth is soft. They hold there, watching each other cautiously. Sherlock reaches up to touch John's face. The faint trace of John's stubble scratches across his palm.

John's expression--grief? relief?--shifts into something devilish and John hits the inside of Sherlock's supporting arm with his elbow, collapsing it. Sherlock falls on top of him with a shout and John rolls them over, rolls over him and somehow hoists him fully onto the bed the wrong way. Their feet are on the pillows and Sherlock's head falls back onto the mattress and John is on top of him, stripping off his pants then kneeling over him, knees on either side of Sherlock's hips.

John runs his hands all over Sherlock's body, palming his cock but not stopping there, pressing and holding his forearms, the sides of his ribcage, the dip of his clavicle, the arc of his hipbone, the tops of his legs. Finally he leans into him again, holding his weight above him, not falling but laying himself out reverently over Sherlock, licking the open expanse of Sherlock's throat, then sitting up again, moving back and away from Sherlock, still holding his hand, pulling Sherlock until he's sitting up.

John reclines on the pillows. Everything slows and now Sherlock crawls across the bed, over John. The terms have shifted. He kneels over John but John is still pulling him, still dragging him up higher toward the headboard. Sherlock eases forward, careful not to pin John's arms under his knees, his cock aching and eager for John's touch, but willing to follow, so willing to do anything to keep this precise smile on John's face. John's hands are on Sherlock's arse and Sherlock gasps as John pulls him forward more, tilts his head back into the pillows and pulls Sherlock in, guiding his hips down until the tip of his cock brushes John's lips.

John opens his mouth, taking in the tip, taking Sherlock in, and tilting his head back further. Hands braced on the headboard Sherlock rises up over John, lowering himself into John's mouth. Somehow John's throat opens to him, taking him in deeper, warm and wet as John's tongue caresses the underside of his cock slowly and the tip hits the back of John's throat.

Sherlock's arms aren't tired but they're shaking, all of him is shaking as John pulls him in deeper. He's sure he'll choke him, but John makes a sound between a groan and a hum and Sherlock can't help himself. He begins to thrust into John's mouth, trying to be gentle, but John rises up to swallow him whole and his tongue is moving rhythmically now and it's all Sherlock can do to hang on to the headboard as he buries himself in John.

His entire body thrums and sings, the surface of his skin seeming to lift away, leaving no boundary at all between him and the room around him except the limit of the dark wooden headboard under his hands and John's warm mouth, John's hands on his hips, holding him close, pulling him in.

His orgasm takes him like an ocean wave, picking him up from his core and plunging him deeper into John, who makes a noise that sounds like approval and swallows hard as Sherlock releases into him over and over.

He shakes as he comes back into himself, hearing John breathing heavily through his nose. He pulls out, still half hard and dripping come and John's saliva over John's lips. It's filthy and sacred, exactly everything he's wanted and more. He pushes himself away from the headboard, down into John's arms, lying with his leg across John's, his hand moving down to grasp John's thick erection.

He brushes his lips across John's perfect mouth, John's lips swollen with friction. He tastes himself, bitter and real. John groans into Sherlock's mouth as Sherlock holds him tighter, moves his hand faster.

It won't do, he decides. Not after what John did for him, to him. He rolls, pulling John over him, pushing him lower, wrapping his legs around John's hips. He doesn't want to use words; he just wants John inside him, over him, somehow. John shakes his head, grasps Sherlock's hand and puts it back on his cock. He's rock hard and trembling, squeezing Sherlock's hand and they're pulling John off together and John comes with a sound somewhere between a groan and a shout all over Sherlock's belly and chest.

He collapses into Sherlock then, panting into Sherlock's neck, their skin starting to stick a little, and they move into each other, John's arms looping under Sherlock's, their legs tangled, John's fingers sinking into his hair.

Neither of them speak for a long time. All the conversation they needed to have, they've had. The room is growing dim. Sunset comes early in winter, and they are such a long way from spring.

John sits up on one elbow, blinking into the darkening room. He reaches for the light, but Sherlock stops his hand. "No. Curtains are open. No need to give the neighbours a show."

John smiles. "I thought I was the shy one." His voice is ruined, full of gravel.

"There will be time to talk about our relative proclivities for exhibition." It's out before Sherlock realizes what he's said. Even though they've stolen this time together, it doesn't mean the future is clear.

He watches John's face change. John clears his throat. "There will be," he says. It's more a wish than an assertion of fact. He can't know that, can't guarantee it.

Sherlock's gaze drifts to the bedside table, his mind on the gun below. "How did you get away?"

John's breath huffs out against the side of his neck. "Mary left a note that said she's gone out of town. I'm guessing it might be permanent. I'm pretty sure she went with David."

A frisson of alarm runs down Sherlock's back. "Those were her precise words? Out of town?"

John nods.

"Out of town" was also Kate's phrase, ergo probably the Woman's. It's code then, and could mean anything, could mean they are anywhere.

He sits up, thinking about the explosive device on the coffee table, the way they've torn down all barriers, here, now, effectively taking away Mary's last pretense for keeping John alive.

"What is it?" John asks.

Somewhere, somehow, the Woman is pulling the trigger on a plan. They need to find her, to find Mary, to stop this. He must protect John at all costs and he has no idea how.

From the sitting room, the text alert on his phone pings. He looks at John, John finally in his arms, John finally here.

He pulls his dressing gown from the hook on the back of the bedroom door and pulls it on as he walks down the corridor, full of dread. His phone sits on a jumble of newspapers. The text is from an unknown number but obviously it's hers: "Good luck, Mr. Holmes."

From the bedroom behind him comes the distinctive pop of a gun with a silencer, firing. Not John's gun: John doesn't use a silencer. John's voice follows with a bitten-off cry, and high-pitched whines that squeeze out with the rhythm of his breath.

Sherlock freezes. John has been shot. John is bleeding in his bed and Sherlock can't move, can't go to him, until he stops whoever shot him. Until he kills whoever shot him.

Even as Sherlock's blood cries out for vengeance, he knows who it is. There is only one person who wouldn't hesitate to kill John in that bed.

His phone is still in his hand. He thumbs "999" but before he can hit the call button, Mary's voice calls out from the corridor: "Don't."


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When she came after him.

She hardly fills the sitting room doorway as she steps into it. Without the belly, her figure is diminutive, compact. He is mildly surprised to learn the pregnancy wasn't real. Mary has kept so many secrets.

She must have gone to some trouble over this one. Stealing blood and urine samples would be no trouble for a working nurse, but the belly has expanded on a reasonable timeline. It can't have been convenient for her to wear, although he supposes the ability to discard it would have simplified her recent wetworks activities.

She's dressed for stealth work, all in black. Mary is often inappropriate, but not today.

"Drop it."

He places the phone on the coffee table.

She holds her gun extended in front of her as she walks toward him. From the bedroom, John groans. Sherlock can't diguise his concern, or his relief that John is still alive, still conscious enough to vocalize.

She raises an eyebrow, studies him. "You might as well sit," she says.

"I'll stand."

"Stand then. Either way, once he makes it down that corridor, you'll have a bullet in your brain."

Not dead then, and not completely incapacitated. Sherlock's mind is in a state of panic, looping through the need to get the ambulance here, now, the need to go to John, now, the need to stop Mary, now. It flutters over facts and reasons why and courses of action without settling on anything.

"What makes you think he'll be able to? Make it down the hallway."

She smirks, her eyes steady. "For you? What wouldn't he do?"

Jealous. Even though none of it was real for her. "You want him to see you do it this time."

"It's the little things," she says. "Speaking of which, where is it?"

"It?" He's picked up some conversational habits from the Woman. When under pressure, minimize.

She rolls her eyes. From the bedroom comes the sound of a heavy body falling onto the floor and a groan. He hopes that John is trying to cover the sound of the gun scraping on the floor, or the sound of the the safety coming off.

"I know John didn't burn the original flash drive. It's not at our flat. I've asked him about it enough times to be sure he doesn't have it. I'm guessing you do."

"Why do you want it? I‘d have thought you'd know what was on it well enough."

She furrows her brow. It's a rare tell for an accomplished liar. Perhaps she doesn't know after all.

He runs through the possibilities. Mycroft has spent enough time on it, has analysed each file. Encrypted information? Something she didn't mean to put on it? How is that possible? Ah. She didn't create it. Someone made it for her. Someone above her. Someone with access to those old files. Someone who tracked her.

She needs to know what she's missed.

"Just give it to me."

He blinks at her. There have been no sounds from the bedroom or the corridor for the past thirty seconds.

"Why should I, if you're going to kill me anyway?"

She is so capable of smiling at things that amuse her. "Because if you don't, I'll kill him first, and I'll make you watch. Not the order I'd planned, but--" She shrugs.

Like a rabbit out of a hat, he realizes he does have the drive, or at least a drive-sized object. A small imbalance in the weight of the box the Woman gave him. He'd felt it without fully processing it, when Kate handed it to him.

The Woman deserves some credit for being thorough, for arranging the three of them in this precise shape.

So much of this plan depends on John, on John's ability to act, on John's determination to see things through. If the Woman has pulled the trigger on this plan of hers, John is the gun; John is the bullet. She has always been confident of John, even when Sherlock hasn't. There is nothing to do in this moment but trust that she's right in this as well as in everything else.

The sound of something scraping against the wall comes from the hallway. 

That Mary still has her back to the kitchen doorway is a miracle. Is it possible she doesn't know that John brought his gun here? John isn't vocalizing any more, but in the moment of silence before Sherlock makes his move he clearly hears John's breath, ragged and harsh. It isn't the laboured gasp of someone with a collapsed lung. It’s probably pain.

Pain means John Watson lives. Pain means he probably hasn't gone into shock, not yet.

He watches her. She isn't looking to the doorway, isn't taking her eyes or the gun from his face. She's already miscalculated. All he must do is keep her distracted.

"I don't know where it is. The flash drive, I mean." He allows his gaze to flicker down toward the coffee table, where the device sits in its box.

She's seen through some things from the beginning. His feelings for John. He's quite sure of that. But she isn't nearly as good at detecting red herrings. She doesn't always know when he's fibbing.

"In the box then?"

He blinks, bites his lower lip. "Probably."

"Probably?"

"Shall I check?" He extends a hand.

"Ah ah!" she says, correcting him as if he is a dog.

John's hand appears on the kitchen doorway. He drags himself around it, his left arm dangling. Somehow he's pulled on his jeans. The gun is tucked into the waistband. His left shoulder and the left side of his chest is awash in so much blood. It runs down his belly, down into the waistline of his jeans, soaking them dark red.

He can't allow Mary to turn and see the gun, not until John stabilizes himself against the doorway.

Sherlock reaches for the box.

Mary's gun is in his face as she takes up the box and lifts the cotton. "Ah," she says. "Was that so hard?" She pulls out the flash drive--it is at least similar enough to hers that she doesn't examine it closely. 

John's hand isn't steady as he raises the gun. His face is white as paper, but so determined. In a moment it will be over, and they'll be able to move forward, or they will both be dead. It all depends on John, what John is capable of, physically, psychologically.

Mary turns a little, and John glances down, at the absence of her belly. No reaction there. He knew. It seems he knew.

"You're just in time, husband," she says. "I wouldn't want you to miss it this time."

"I won't," he says.

Sherlock's eyes close. It's an involuntary gesture born of fear and the plunging sensation in his belly. If John hadn't spoken, Mary wouldn't have turned. If John hadn't spoken in that tone, Mary might have continued with her arrogant presumption that John had nothing. If John hadn't growled those words, miraculously loud for a man who has just been shot, Mary might not have had the chance to raise her gun.

He opens his eyes to the ping of Mary's gun and the explosive holler of John's.

Mary jerks hard and falls. The glass of the right hand pocket door shatters, spraying glass into the kitchen doorway beside John.

Sherlock leaps the coffee table and kicks Mary's gun from her limp hand, turns and picks up his phone, finally hitting the call button. Noise comes through the phone into his ear, a human voice trying to talk to him. John collapses in a heap on the kitchen floor, his knees buckling, his face almost yellow now. Sherlock feels for a pulse and there is one, weak but there.

He talks fast into the phone, explaining there's been an attack and John is hurt, blood loss, gunshot. He says John, John Watson, and the dispatch operator replies, "What is John's condition now?" Somehow that satisfies a need deep within him.

"Sherlock." John calls his name. John is awake and alive. The wound is in his shoulder, a fresh hole in the old map of his scar. "Is she?"

Sherlock looks over at Mary's body. She is utterly unmoving. Her eyes are glassy. Her head is turned away.

The shot spun her a little.

He goes to her, to examine her. The side of her neck, the side that was turned toward John, is open and has bled profusely, soaking the carpet. He looks for an exit wound: there is none. From the angle it's possible the bullet hit her cervical spine.

He holds her wrist long enough to confirm that she's dead.

John is sitting up against the kitchen wall when Sherlock returns to him. Sherlock shakes his head.

John nods, coughs. He winces and groans. He's trembling. They're both trembling. John extends his hand and Sherlock takes it. They hold there.

"She didn't think you would--" Sherlock says, then presses his lips together. This is not the time.

"She thought I left my gun at home," John says. "She didn't know about the other one."

John's face cracks into a smile and he looks into Sherlock's eyes, squeezes his hand. His gaze is steady and sure and haunted and lovely.

Sherlock's phone buzzes in his dressing gown pocket. A text.

_You have come through, Mr. Holmes?_  the Woman asks.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hours after.

He watches through the window in the hospital stairwell. Outside, she strolls down the pavement, crosses to the other side of the street. She's been walking the same loop for forty-five minutes, phone in hand. She moves languidly, like she's at a garden party.

His phone buzzes. _I'm bored. Come down from your window._

It's the latest in a string of messages.

_He won't be out of surgery yet. Coffee?_

_Remember dancing in Lisbon? Let's do that again._

_Or not. I imagine you're done dancing. With me at least._

_It's lovely to walk down the street without fear of assassination. Join me?_

John is in recovery. He won't be able to see him for at least another hour. The surgery ran long. There are consequences. Potential nerve damage. Rehabilitation.

There are other consequences. John Watson lives, and Mary is dead. They are free, but at what price? The price is not his. It's John's.

Down on the pavement below the dust-streaked window, the Woman turns and looks up at him. She wears the fox-fur coat. Her hair, in dark waves, meets the black fur and mingles with it.

His footfalls echo down the empty stairwell. As he pushes open the door to the outside, the cold air hits him like a slap. The sky is bright blue. Midwinter.

She stands, uncertain. Will he approach? He will. They walk together, in silence at first, their steps matching in an easy, languid rhythm.

"He's okay," she says.

"That remains to be seen."

A Eurasian jay lands on the edge of a trash bin, plucks out some food, and eyes them, its pale brown feathers and striped head sharp against the dull metal of the bin, the pale concrete pavement. Resourceful. Cunning. Empty of regrets.

Sherlock envies the jay. He probably does things in the right order.

She hands him her phone. He thumbs through it. She's bookmarked notices of arrests, Revenue and Customs investigations, and at least two deaths that appear to be suicides. He reads without comment.

She speaks. "Mary was higher up in the organization than we could have imagined. We traced her recent activities and came to some very interesting conclusions about its true structure. Large. Therefore vulnerable. Not as well controlled as we thought. Porous. Still, not without its defenses. If Mary had not been distracted yesterday, she might have been able to warn them."

"Distracted. Is that a new term for homicidal?"

She hums. "As it is, we estimate we've put our hands on at least half of the major players."

"You call that success?"

"I call it sufficient."

He hands the phone back to her. "Don't let Mycroft get used to working with you. He'll never leave you alone."

She smiles up at a nearby CCTV camera. "Sage advice."

"What about the leaders? Brother and sister, you said?"

"Figments. Mary's work. As it turns out she was very good at building decoys out of paperwork. Impressive, really, but too much for her. In the end she couldn't quite manage it. Story of her private life, too."

An ambulance rumbles down the street. After it passes they cross the road together, walk past the hospital entrance.

"'Private life' is a strange term to use here." He's exhausted. Waxing philosophical. "I'm not sure you could say she had one. Nor have any of us. Not for some time."

She stops, turns to him. "Now perhaps you can."

The pavement is solid enough, the air cold enough, the sky blue and the day bright and the world here and true. Still, none of it holds. Nothing that happened between him and John holds. He needs there to be more. He needs John to wake up. If there isn't more, it will slip. It will all run and smear. He's been awake since yesterday morning. Every nerve and muscle, every follicle, every pore, needs John. 

She smiles at him. It's mild. Her eyes are steady. There is no mockery there. "Scars fade."

He looks across the street. The jay has long since flown away. He can't begin to articulate what he needs to say.

"I should go. He'll be awake soon." He wants to ask for advice. Does he still need it? He'll probably always need it.

She slips her arm through his, squeezes his wrist, releases him. "Talk to him. Or better yet, listen."


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When he woke up.

In the room there is no sound but the ever-shifting hum of the fluorescent overhead light. It's an electric oppression; it's the voice of a Tibetan monk. A chorus of insects. The slow steady sound of his mind, unspooling.

John is small and empty under the white sheet. His breath is soft, inaudible. Sherlock has to watch carefully, unblinking, to see the shallow rise and fall of chest and belly.

Yet John is fine. The doctors say he's going to be fine. The physical recovery will take time.

There are wounds the doctors can't see. There will be no word on those, not until John himself speaks.

It doesn't matter how deep the damage goes. Sherlock will not leave. Even if John tells him to go, he won't. He'll die before he leaves. He'll stay by John's side as a ghost, eternally faithful, forever present.

John sighs, and Sherlock leaps to his feet, grasps the sheet by John's hip. He is unmoored; he must anchor himself. John's eyes flicker and he blinks into wakefulness, squints into the room.

It's wonderful to see John seep back into himself, the small squeeze of the corners of his eyes, the "o" of his mouth as he gasps, tries to sit up.

"Hospital," Sherlock says. "You're safe."

Sherlock slips a hand under John's back, under the right side, the good shoulder, and eases him back onto the bed.

John's hand finds his, squeezes the bones of his hand together painfully. John tries to speak, his throat hoarse.

Sherlock offers water. John sips, nods. 

"You?" John manages.

"I'm fine." He knows, from his most recent trip to the toilet, that he doesn't look it. He's exhausted, his eyes red-rimmed, his face pale. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. "Are you in pain?"

John shakes his head, and, miraculously, smiles. "I'm shot."

"Yes."

"Again."

"Yes."

John looks at the door to the room, at the window, where the afternoon light is fading fast. Twenty-four hours ago, John was whole and they were in Sherlock's bed. Now this. Another hospital room. The wrong side of the mirror.

John pulls on his hand, pulls him down. Sherlock leans over, compliant, wrung out. John runs his hand up Sherlock's arm, over his shoulder, the side of his neck.

"It's over," John says. His hand touches Sherlock's jaw, temple. "It is over, isn't it?"

Sherlock is certain John means them, what they did together, what they've been. He careens through replies: he could deny; he could tell John it's barely begun. He could lean down and kiss him, tenderly or passionately. He could be petulant. He could be cross. He could confess his undying love. He settles on hope. He settles on offering information.

"Much of it. I'm sure Mycroft will be happy to fill us in on precisely what remains. But you needn't worry about any of that."

"No," John says. "I don't mean their plan. I mean what I did. The mess I made. It's finished."

The Woman told him to listen. He sits up, intertwines their fingers. "What do you mean?"

"Mary's dead."

"She is."

John turns his face away, toward the window. True to his promise to himself, Sherlock does not slacken his grip. Inside, he coils down into the cold place. John might abandon him. It's his right, and his choice. But Sherlock will not let go.

John's breath hitches. Something has gone wrong. Fear leaps into Sherlock's throat. He's eyeing the call button when John turns back, looks at him with such intensity that Sherlock's focus crystallizes down to a knife point.

John says, "I was going to leave her."

His voice is hushed, a harsh whisper, a rich, strained counterpoint to the hum of the lights. Between the words the hum rises. When John speaks, it recedes. The strangest symphony.

"Before I knew what she'd done, I knew I couldn't stay with her. I had a plan. I scripted it, how I would speak to her. I’d planned to apologize." He smiles faintly. It is absurd, the thought of John apologizing to Mary. "And request a divorce."

John turns away again, but he squeezes Sherlock's hand, holds it tight. Something warm comes loose in Sherlock's chest. He can't breathe. He doesn't dare.

"When I found out she shot you, it changed my mind. I had to see it through. I had to."

It is worth everything, every passage Sherlock has made between life and death, every wound, every scar, every moment of hell and exile, to see the look on John's face when he turns back. He's seen John angry, John impassioned many times before, but this is John stripped raw, John without any remaining defenses. The veil is down, the rice paper torn. All the years he's loved, all the time he's waited, was for this.

"It had to be me, Sherlock. I worked with Mycroft and Irene to make this happen. In the end Mary hated me more than she resented you. I thought she would target me, and me alone. It was all worked out. But then yesterday. My stupid need. I couldn't wait any longer to be with you. I imagined somehow it wasn't a terrible decision."

Of course John takes responsibility for this final act, this placement of the last puzzle piece. It wasn’t him alone. The Woman’s plan, her web, has bound them together. In risking their lives, she saved them for each other. If John understood the extent to which she’s worked on this, on them. Well. Sherlock can only imagine his outrage.

He smiles, holds John’s hand in both of his. "It was the best thing you could have done." And John has done so much. John has done what was necessary, for himself, for both of them.

John's voice is full of pain. "She might have hurt you again. She might have killed you."

"She didn't."

John nods. His mouth turns down. He nods again.

"I'm coming back," he says. "I'm coming back home."

Sherlock draws breath again, comes back to life again. This decision is John’s to make, and John’s alone.

John's hand is warm. They hold there, together. The fluorescent lights sing their harsh mantra. Together they hold.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it! When I started writing this fic, it was going to be maybe a five or six chapter experiment in playing with Irene Adler's voice and the dynamic between her and Sherlock. I had no idea I would be continuing it for as long as I have, but it's been amazing to play with the (multiple, massive) gaps Moftiss have left in series three.
> 
> This is as close as I'm going to get to wild speculation / predictions about what our future holds. Sadly I don't think the show will ever have a sex scene to rival any that you lovely fic writers have cooked up, but I am willing to bet that John did move back to 221B after he found out that Mary shot Sherlock, I do think he's conspiring with Mycroft to work against Mary, and I do think he's going to kill her. Tjlc is real, obviously. I'm still pulling for fake baby Watson too. 
> 
> As for Irene's future role on the show, I'm not making any predictions. Her relationship with Sherlock in this fic really grew out of my desire to see Sherlock have the help he so sorely needs with his personal life, poor lamb.
> 
> Thank you so much to each of you who read, commented, and patiently waited for each update. Thanks especially to those who beta fished for me: monikakrasnorada, hopelesslybenaddicted, iamjohnlocked4life, heimishtheidealhusband, queenmab3, hotdiggitydollie. Those are their tumblr handles: go follow them all!


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